Hotel Artemis

Los Angeles, ten years hence, and the place
is a hellhole of the worst riots the city has ever known, on account of the
privatisation of water. Crime is rife and, as the bullets fly in all
directions, it’s not only the man or woman in the street who gets clobbered,
but also the criminal fraternity at large are being picked off too. The
eponymous haven of rest is a well-established private health facility set up by
the Wolf King, the city’s most notorious gangster, for criminal members only.
It’s run by Jean Thomas, aka The Nurse (Jodie Foster), along with her sidekick
orderly, Everest (Dave Bautista), named on account of his height but in fact
he’s more disorderly when dealing with the encroaching mobsters.

The Nurse is an aging
agoraphobic dipsomaniac with a neat line in surgery and is especially nifty at patching
up bullet holes when the hoods come calling, thereby bypassing the need to
involve the police or regular doctors. Foster ages up to granny status as The
Nurse, perfecting an old lady, small-step walk that looks like a geisha girl or
one of those home-help robots that now threaten our daily lives.

Patients are dealt with
anonymously as they assume the name of the hotel room in which they are
staying. As bank robber ‘Waikiki’ Sterling K.
Brown exudes a certain bullish charm, and as his brother, fellow felon ‘Honolulu’, Bryan Tyree
Henry gloats over knocking off a diamond-encrusted pen worth millions. As
international assassin Nice (it’s pronounced Neese, she claims) Sofia Boutella
kicks her way out of trouble clad in a long red dress and bovver boots, as if
she’s come straight off a catwalk.

Writer and debut director
Drew Pearce creates a more than credible dystopian Los Angeles landscape with some good ’n’
bloody action sequences. He also keeps us guessing as to who the star victim of
the riots will turn out to be when he arrives at Hotel Artemis seeking
treatment. The real name of Mr ‘Niagara’ is
omitted here to protect the guilty.